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Thursday, May 31, 2007

On Faith Or Reason--A Response to Senator Brownback--PZ Myers

"Please, Senator Brownback, define "faith". You keep throwing that word around as if it actually has some substantial meaning, but it seems to me that all you're doing is inserting an emotionally-loaded buzzword that has its import dunned into your voters from birth to death, while avoiding saying anything of significance about it.

"I know the scientific method. Faith isn't in it, or anywhere near it, although you could make a good case that doubt and suspicion are everywhere in it. The scientific method is a tool to counter faith and intuition and other such misleading biases that investigators bring to their research.

"There is also some confusion about what faith can accomplish. I reject faith, yet somehow I have value and meaning in my life, I feel empathy for those who suffer, and I love. I do not need your dogma to understand those matters. I do so by observing my own life, the lives of others, the consequences of actions on people—by considering just the material world, not assuming an irrelevant supernatural one.

"Brownback is intentionally, I suspect, muddling his words. He is replacing "compassion" with the nonsense word, "faith". Compassion is a human value possessed by scientists and by citizens, atheists and the devout; we do not need faith, that bamboozling misleading sacred delusion, to live as good human beings.

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